The World is Flat: Tolerating and Welcoming Refugees from the Hivemind

Posted November 19, 2015byMatt Parrott

There’s been some controversy in the alt-right scene lately over whether the earth is a flat disk surrounded by the icy Antarctic wasteland or whether it’s spherical and spinning around. Astrophysics isn’t really my thing, but what I do know is that many of our supporters are Australians, South Africans, and Chileans, …none of whom report being upside-down. The TradYouth project takes no official position on the sphericity of the planet, but I certainly do.

The world is flat.

The world is flat, and it’s going to get flatter. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. The traditional hierarchies and their methods of communication are getting flattened by the twin forces of massively distributed communication technology and the credibility crisis growing between the elites and the peasantry. This whole “flat earth” thing is most likely not a psyop intended to discredit us or an isolated incident to laugh off. It’s a harbinger of much more that’s in store as common folks lose faith in our society’s priesthood of appointed elders and start thinking for themselves.

We need to put a lot of thought into how we respond to the flat earth meme, because how we handle conspiratorial and anti-establishment positions of our comrades, allies, and persuadables will become a major challenge in outreach.

The proposition that the majority of folks are even capable of critical thinking is a cornerstone myth of the Enlightenment worldview. For the most part, the myth holds up for a long time in a homogeneous and stable society, because there’s an organic process where people naturally mirror their more educated, intelligent, and higher-status peers. That the overwhelming majority of folks find flat earth laughable says nothing about their grasp of astrophysics, geology, and even the most rudimentary critical thinking.

On this count, the flat earthers are absolutely correct. The majority of folks, including very bright folks, are just borrowing their dogmatic spherical position from the hivemind. Alex Jones types always carry on about the need to “investigate for yourself,” to “stop being a sheep,” and to “critically examine the world around you.” That sounds nice in theory, but the Bell Curve is what it is, people are too immersed in their families, occupations, and hobbies to invest the necessary time and energy it takes to have an intelligent position on everything. And even if they do find the time to investigate, there’s a gordian knot of lies, distractions, and rabbit holes sure to trip up all but the most keen critical thinkers.

Like it or not, we racial realists, anti-semites, and radical traditionalists are part-and-parcel of that rapidly growing phenomenon of the Western masses scrambling for lifeboats as the cruise liner of establishment consensus takes on water. The SPLC’s Mark Potok, in his recent Salon article, lists off ten “conspiracy theories” which have recently captivated the White American mind. Potok’s being the anti-White Jewish Leftist that he is, and he’s chortling alongside his fellow institutional “experts” at all of those White Americans believing wacky things.

This is analogous to a train conductor who’s heading for a cliff chortling to himself about all the fools injuring themselves as they dive off of the train. He smugly regards it as proof of their foolishness rather than understanding it for what it is: a growing credibility crisis that he and his friends are losing ground on. What all these people who believe these goofy things agree with us on is that the establishment narrative is a lie. They didn’t come to this position easily, or as a manifestation of some sort of undiagnosed mental illness, as the Leftists would like to imagine.

People know that they’ve been lied to. They have. But they have no way of knowing exactly what they’ve been lied to about or to what extent. They’re going to go off in some downright Fortean directions, and our opponents will continue actively encouraging them to slip deeper into Ripley’s Believe it or Not quackery. What we need to do is set aside our reflexive frustration with people we believe to be incorrect and strike a balance where we avoid getting entangled in or distracted by the maze of conspiratorial distractions which will only become more popular and elaborate as the ranks of refugees from the hivemind grows.

Go easy on the flat earthers. Without exception, everybody believes something ridiculous. Except for me, of course. The fear that they’ll drive off sensible people is overblown. We couldn’t stop people from diving for alternative social and political paradigms if we wanted. Like just about all of our victories, the credit rests with our enemies. They’re doing a terrible job of keeping White Americans on message, and they show no sign of self-correcting.

I’m confident that when the dust settles, the identitarian and traditionalist positions will have staying power that other alternative paradigms and memes will not. Besides, it’s not like it’s a zero-sum thing. I’m not sure I would climb into a space shuttling knowing that the folks at ground control were relying on the flat earth hypothesis for their calculations. But how plausible is that scenario?

Whether one’s a young earth creationist or an evolutionist, whether one’s a climate change denier or confirmer, society plugs along just fine when people believe wildly divergent things. Unless somebody is up to something patently dishonorable, the best policy is to gently encourage folks to place some daylight between their unorthodox opinions and our identitarian and traditionalist work and leave it at that. Identitarians around (aflat?) the world have to find a way to work past their knee-jerk reactions and figure out how to constructively work with a broad spectrum of identitarians if we hope to be unified enough to take on our powerful and aggressive opponents.

9 Comments

Very good article, I agree – I think it’s important that we all recognize that each and every one of us involved in this movement came to this point in our lives from different perspectives. We all have different experiences and interests, and our “wake up calls,” so to speak, are varied (for me, it was 9/11).

I encourage everyone to pursue their intellectual and philosophical interests, engage in critical thinking, and investigate any and all topics of interests to them, including (maybe especially!) the Flat Earth theory.

I just encourage them to agree with me on everything rather than waste all that time critically thinking and researching. Why rock climb up the mountain when you can take a leisurely gondola ride to the peak of truth, justice, and the American way?

At risk of sounding like a silly fangirl, I’ve considered Matt Parrott as one of the more (most?) perceptive, original a under-appreciated writers in greater Alt-Right-o-Sphere (little pun intended, I guess) for quite a few years now. After reading your pieces, I usually think ‘I wish I could look at it from this angle first.’
There was probably some amount of overreaction to this flat Earth stuff, though to be fair it’s not an easy task to keep one’s restraint in face of theory such as this one.

No no no. The “flat earth” theory is deliberate disinformation. There has been an upheaval in the “truther” community (meaning YouTube channels and websites) over this recently. I listened to much of Jeff C.’s podcast at Free Radio Revolution ULTIMATE yesterday evening:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JWM9urxVzA
It is three hours, but maybe some of you can get the gist of it without investing the whole three hours.

Don’t you think that if the government wanted to disrupt investigations into its covered-up misdeeds it would try to infiltrate the groups that were trying to expose this and plant absurd theories like “flat earth”?

You really must look into the truther claims more seriously. Jim Fetzer’s book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” was just withdrawn by Amazon after selling 500 copies in a short span of time. This is censorship, dammit. By the way, the book is available for free online for the time being at http://rense.com/general96/nobodydied.html

Jeff C. announced that we was withdrawing from the truther movement yesterday because of harassment. You need to poke around for yourself to see what is happening. He was objecting over the insistence on the “flat earth” earth theory and other things. The flat earth theory is being promoted by people who are probably getting government funding.

I was pro-white before I started following the truther scene. Race-neutral conspiracy theories are safer. If you tell someone you believe Sandy Hook was a hoax, they just think you are crazy. If you tell them you are pro-white, they think you are evil.

One of the beneficial things about commenting is that it facilitates communication between people who are knowledgeable about different things. That is how I found out about pro-white sites 10 years ago.

Attempting to answer your question more directly, I am not arguing in an adversarial sense. I wish I could do more to help the pro-white cause. What I do is contribute money (not to your organization yet) and write comments. It will always be tough for me to do more than that. Maybe in the future I will contribute more money and write fewer comments.